What's so great about gold anyway? Let's face it, it's easy to get, like printing paper, from printing presses that grow on trees, falling from the sky. A person doesn't even have to be productive. They just run some dalies and there we go: gold. They might even be more useless than the speculators, and we certainly should get rid of them.

Dailies just aren't helping us. The inflation makes us poorer!

I propose that players stop accepting gold as payment for services and instead demand something tangible, like frozen orbs, saronite, adder's tongue, and cloth. This will reveal the worthlessness of dailies, except when used to buy fun items like BoE pets or to gain rep.

Let's not be seduced by the myth of the gold standard. Gold, whether in WoW or real life, is worth nothing more than we think it is. So we might as well go with something useful. Let's not be 1930s Germany with worthless money printed off ever faster to pay off our debts and inflation.

Of course using frozen orbs would just encourage people to run more senselessly boring randoms. Using trade mats would cause horrible camping and might just result in farming way past the point of usefulness, making ore barely better than gold, which can at least be turned into train sets, which are priceless. On the plus side it would make WG a much more interesting place.

Saronite is rising relative to elemental fire, will this cause a run on the netherweave stockpiles?

5
comments:

You think daily quest rewards inflate the economy? What about those gold sellers who hack an account, sell that person's entire bank contents on the AH asap and then Blizzard restores everything that was sold.

Have you ever had an Auction reverse because the contents had to be handed back to the rightful owner? Yeah me neither.

And don't underestimate the value of what you have in your bank/inv. And how quickly Blizzard can turn around and restore it (or should I say, duplicate it).

Gold due to vendoring would be trivial. Gold due to the ah is not new gold, and in fact destroys a slight amount. Instead it would be materials which are duplicated, which I believe is on too small a scale to matter much, but if it did, would cause lower prices.

Good point, everyone should dump all their gold, which will soon be used to buy new flying skill/new mounts/new everything in Cata, and instead stock up on lvl 80 craftable BOE's which are about to explode in value. Really, I'm not kidding.

You could have at least distinguished between those items which could gain in value after Cata through the lack of farming in Northrend combined with the need for certain mats for lvling tradeskills for the countless goblins and worgens, and those which will become largely useless, but you were too busy advocating a return to the barter economy to think even that deeply.

The obvious response to this asinine post is this: We'll stop using gold in WoW when you stop using money IRL. Your mention of money is infantile:

"Let's not be seduced by the myth of the gold standard. Gold, whether in WoW or real life, is worth nothing more than we think it is. So we might as well go with something useful. Let's not be 1930s Germany with worthless money printed off ever faster to pay off our debts and inflation."

#1, Money IRL isn't worth as much as we think it is, it's worth as much as our actions determine it to be worth. There is no magical meeting of minds to determine the value of money IRL via neuronal voting, Thought > actions > perception > (thoughts of other people). Some people's actions have no effect on the average perception of money's worth, some people's actions have a huge effect. This is incredibly basic philosophy, which leads me to

#2 Blizzard has much more control over the value of gold ingame than governments do over the value of money IRL. Interestingly, Blizzard has not historically exercised very much control on the workings of their currencies in their games, but this restraint does not equate to abdication of the right to make future changes.

Since we see that there is no philosophical basis for your post, we are left to wonder, what was your motivation for posting it in the first place? My hypothesis is that you didn't have anything better to write, so you just thought up a lame suggestion meant as an ironic critique of a certain other blogger's recent post about Gdkp runs, but which only ends up revealing your envy of him, as well as your inability to pull his style off successfully.

I'm breaking my own rules by leaving your comment up (Don't be stupid), since you're being quite stupid if you think this was intended to be a suggestion for players managing their wealth. This was written before Gevlon's GDKP post, not in response to it. I have no desire to imitate Gevlon's style.

But thank you. You don't realize how important it makes me feel to have my own rude and stupid troll stalking my posts. I wish I mattered so much to more people.

I think people start to enjoy the process of making money than the actual activities that can be done with it. In a way, gathering items, crafting gear and selling it all on the AH is no different from any other aspect for the game.

I do agree that the money in itself is pretty worthless though as almost everything you need and want in WoW is dirt cheap on bind-on-pickup anyway!